Every day in labs, museums, out on fieldwork, taxonomists are busy collecting, cataloguing, identifying, comparing, describing and naming species new to science. Some 300 taxonomists globally also contribute their valuable time to keeping the World Register of Marine Species up to date. Today is a chance for us at WoRMS to thank our taxonomic editors for this important task. And we celebrate the work of taxonomists now with the WoRMS list of the top-ten marine species described in 2018 as nominated and voted for by taxonomists!

This top-ten list is just a small highlight of almost 2,000 fascinating new marine species discovered every year.

How were the species chosen?

All editors of WoRMS were given the opportunity to nominate their favourite marine species from the last year (2018). Nominated species must have been described between January 1st and December 31st, 2018, and have come from the marine environment (including fossil taxa but excluding freshwater or terrestrial taxa). A small committee (including both taxonomists and data managers) was brought together to decide upon the final candidates. The list is in no hierarchical order.

The final decisions reflect the immense diversity of animal groups in the marine environment (including fish, crustaceans, molluscs, corals, sponges, jellies, worms) and highlight some of the challenges facing the marine environment today (e.g. invasive species, ecosystems threatened by climate change, deep-sea environments impacted by resource extraction). The final candidates also feature particularly astonishing marine creatures, notable for their interest to both science and the public.

Each of these marine animals has a story. From the bizarre blanket hermit crab which uses an anemone ‘blanket’ instead of a shell for a home, the Hong Kong Sea Dragon, a species which is only the second to be described in its phylum, to a ‘walking’ deep-sea leech!

About the WoRMS top-ten list of Marine Species

After 250 years of describing, naming and cataloguing the species we share our planet with, we are still some way off achieving a complete census. However, we do know that at least 247,000 marine species have been described because their names are managed in WoRMS by almost 300 scientists located all over the world.